The Barbarian said:
But if you can accept that your parents brought you into the world by natural means and still love you, why is it hard to accept that God brought the human race into the world by natural means and still loves us?
Hello Barbarian.
There would be absolutely nothing wrong with that except that's not what God said He did.
What exactly do you mean by God creating the human race by "natural" means?
It's a rhetorical question as you know.
I just don't see why you fight so vehemently to prove God's word is wrong Barbarian.
There are excellent scientists working today who do not accept evolution, and not all of them are Christians, or any God based faith.
I’ve seen this debate change gears over the years where the discussions used to be in regards to the excellent fossil corroboration, and that’s exactly where the evidence must lay if the theory is correct.
However no evolutionary scientists are debating fossils anymore, because they understand it’s a losing cause, and so now the debate is exclusively in regards to DNA.
This is because the science is relatively new and extremely complex, and therefore these discussions are not easily concluded because in most cases the studies are not completed.
Also, the layman who is interested in the discussions can only repeat what the scientists are discussing in general terms due to the obvious fact that we are not geneticists. That’s almost a moot point though because if the fossils aren’t here then it could not and did not happen on a genetic level, that should be apparent, but for some reason these debates continue in spite of this obvious fact.
I must reiterate; I simply cannot understand why any Christian would abandon his faith in God’s word and side with in effect the enemy, in spite of the fact that the evidence for evolution is extremely tentative, and the fact that there are extremely highly educated creation and atheists scientists who are telling us the theory doesn’t hold water.
If I am involved in any debate where a biblical reality, or doctrine is being challenged and there is one group of “experts “opposing the scriptures and another group of “experts†supporting the scriptures, I am siding with the group that supports God’s word every time!
How can you switch camps like this barbarian? Especially when the evidence for evolution is so flimsy?
The random generator is very nice, but it's only half of evolution. The other half is natural selection. If you put that in the program, you'll get a result that creationists say is impossible. Engineers use just such generators to solve problems that are too complicated for design.
Natural selection is accounted for in the program.
http://www.randommutation.com/darwinianevolution.htm
...Now we add Natural Selection
With English, Natural Selection equates to people preferring one sentence over the other.
One of the best real-world examples of natural selection is advertising. Let's say you sell quick brown foxes and you want to advertise them on the Internet. You could write a paid Google advertisement (you see them running down the right side of the screen when you search) that says something like this:
Quick Brown Fox
Jumps Over Your Lazy Dog
Other Colors Available too - Black, White
www.QuickBrownFox.com
One of the cool things about Google is you can write several ads and they compete with each other for clicks. You could write a different version of the ad
Fast Black Foxes
Jump Over Lazy Dogs
Black, White, Brown - 50% off
www.QuickBrownFox.com
You run both ads simultaneously for a day or two.
Let's say the first one gets clicked on 1% of the time, the second one gets clicked on 3% of the time.
That means the second one is 3 times better than the first. The second one wins, the first one gets deleted. (This is exactly how it's done, by the way.) In fact Google is the ultimate Darwinian advertising machine! The winners rise and the losers fall.
And again, if we've never actually seen Random Mutation before, we might imagine that the Random Mutation Generator would be quite helpful in writing new ads.
See For Yourself The Random Mutation Generator is NOT Helpful AT ALL...
If you experiment with this yourself, you will quickly discover this doesn't work at all - because random mutation seems to only destroy your sentences:
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog
after 5 mutations becomes
Qhe qu4ck brown fox jimpeX over.the lazy dog
and after 10 mutations becomes
Qhe qN4ck brown fox Vim3eX oeer.the lazy Iog
Or let's take these ads we've just written:
After 5 mutations:
Fast Black Foxes
Jump Ove6 Lazy Dogs
kylack, White, Brown - 50% off
whw.QuickBrownFox.coL
After 10 mutations:
Fast Black Foxes
Jump3Ove6 LaSy Dogs
kylack, White, Browf - y0% off
whw.QuickBrownFod.coL
If you play with the Random Mutation Generator for about 10 minutes, you begin to see that in order to get your sentence to evolve in any useful way at all, the mutations would HAVE to focus on individual words and leave the other words alone. But maddeningly, the mutation generator doesn't do that. It just randomly destroys the stuff that was already good. Random mutation is blind and has no respect for what is already working fine.
And it doesn't matter how many times you hit the reset button and start over. The most you can ever get from this is a minor spelling change from a few mutations. But once you've attained some kind of very modest change, the random mutations continue to destroy what you've built. After 20-30 mutations it's not even recognizable as English anymore!
There's an Even Bigger Problem
Let's say you want the word
Brown to evolve into the word
Black. Shouldn't be too hard, should it? Only four letters need to change after all. But even if you could get the mutations to concentrate just on those four letters, you'd still get a mis-spelled word, which natural selection would eliminate before it ever evolved into the correct spelling.
Let's try it, one mutation at a time:
Brown > Brorn > Brorb > BrorW > qrorW > qKorW > qKoJW > qKoyW > qFoyW > qjoyW > qjTyW
After 10 mutations we didn't have a single letter remaining.
Maybe we need to do more than 1 mutation at a time? If I do 5 at a time maybe I can make the leap in one step:
Brown > Vr17n
Remember: In real life, mis-spelled words will cause our ads to go extinct.
A mis-spelled ad with garbage characters can't compete with a correctly spelled one - nobody will respond to it. Mis-spellings are not what we want and they're NOT good!
Our only hope is some kind of "punctuated equilibrium" where big jumps happen all at once. What's the chances of evolving
Brown >
Black in one step?
You can easilycalculate the statistical chances of this. For each letter there are 52 possible letters (including lower case and caps) and 10 numbers, plus a few punctuation marks. There's a total of about 65 possible characters per letter.
So the chances of evolving
Brown to
Black in one step are
one chance in 65 to the power of 5, which is
one chance in 1,160,290,625 (
just over one in a billion).
One in a billion odds against evolving just ONE WORD - that's pretty remote.
...And it only gets worse
Remember, that's just ONE five-letter word. For a whole sentence like
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog
which has 44 characters, there are
5.8639153496314421699960747595891e+79 possible combinations.
That's about the same as the number of particles in the entire universe.
Now obviously there are many possible sentences that can be constructed with 44 characters, maybe billions. Maybe even trillions. But even with billions or trillions - compared to 10 to the power of 79, all you're doing is knocking off a dozen zeros. Whether you do this experimentally or statistically, you quickly realize - this is hopeless!
The problem is this: It's impossible to re-write a sentence one or two letters at a time without getting fatal spelling errors in between - which cause your sentence to become extinct.
Oh, and there's one other problem: The longer the text, the worse it gets. It's fairly easy to produce a few real words with the Random Mutation Generator if you start with only five or six characters. But a complete sentence, like The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog, is nearly hopeless, as we've already seen. Every single letter you add to your sentence makes your odds worse by a factor of 65. Those 65's multiply real, real fast. An entire paragraph or page of text - that's a disaster!
Your own DNA contains as much information as a stack of encyclopedias. Would you even dream of trying to edit an encyclopedia with a random mutation generator? (Anyone who wants to is welcome to try.)
Short Easy Sentences vs. Real DNA, Real Biological Systems
Again, we've just played with a 44 character sentence. But what about real life?
The simplest known micro-organism is a parasite called Nanoarchaeum. It's got 490,885 base pairs. In other words its DNA has a string of almost half a million characters, each of which is the letter A, C, G or T. A simpler living organism is not known to exist.
Our sentence The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog requires 308 bits (1's and 0's) to represent in binary computer language (ASCII). Nanoarchaeum's DNA, by comparison, requires 981,770 bits to represent in binary computer language. Nanoarchaeum contains 3000 times more information than our simple sentence.
If a short sentence like The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog can't evolve through random mutation, then even "simple" microorganisms that are thousands of times more complex won't be able evolve through random mutation either. Random mutation does not create new information, it only destroys information.
Evolution through Random Mutation:
Possibly the Greatest Myth in Modern Science
The idea that random mutation creates biological diversity fails computer simulations*; it fails if you compute the statistics; and it fails biologically. This observation was confirmed by Theodosius Dobzhansky's fruit fly radiation experiments, Goldschmidt's gypsy moth experiments, and others. Decades of research were conducted in the early 20th century, bombarding fruit flies and moths with radiation in hope of mutating their DNA and producing improved creatures. These experiments were a total failure – there were no observed improvements – only weak, sickly, deformed fruit flies.
A bit of experimentation with the Random Mutation generator makes it clear why:
• Language, plans and instructions do not evolve from the "bottom up."
• Language, plans and instructions do not evolve in microscopic increments, one or two letters at a time. They evolve in increments of entire words, phrases, sentences and paragraphs.
• Language, plans and instructions evolve as an expression of ideas which come first.
When you write or speak, you begin with intent which becomes a sentence made of words which are made of letters. When you translate from English to French, for example, you cannot translate one letter at a time. And you can't really translate one word at a time either, that's a disaster. You have to translate idea for idea. The same is true when you edit a document that you or someone else has written - the letters are subordinate to the words, which are subordinate to the ideas. Ideas come first.
Evolution via Random Mutation is nothing more than an urban legend. Why does this superstition persist? I believe it's because 99.9% of the people who believe it and talk about it have never conducted an experiment like this to see with their own eyes that it just doesn't work.
Randomness vs. Science
The entire enterprise of scientific inquiry has always been the assumption and discovery of underlying order. NOT disorder! From Copernicus, Galileo and Newton right up to the present day, science has always succeeded by assuming in advance that there are specific undiscovered causes for the behavior of the physical world. Scientists have always been motivated by a belief that these causes could be discovered. In fact science itself was born from a philosophical worldview that believed (for mostly theological reasons) that the universe was governed by an unchanging, predictable, discoverable set of laws.
Could life and DNA have risen randomly? There is perhaps some remote chance that they did. However I contend that such an explanation does not even qualify as a scientific explanation at all, simply based on the dictionary definition of science itself:
sci•ence (s?'ens) n. The observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena.
Chance or accident as a proposed origin of anything defies observation, identification, description and experimental investigation. So "Randomness" per se not only doesn't explain how anything operates, it is categorically not even an explanation.
It doesn't produce a testable hypothesis. It doesn't give anyone the ability to reproduce what happened in the past.
Whenever randomness is said to be an explanation of any particular process, then that explanation by definition can never be reproduced or tested. It only evades the question and ties the powerful hands of science behind its back.
"Randomness" as a theory of biological diversity is not merely bad science, it's a wholesale avoidance of scientific inquiry. It leads to theories and terms like 'Junk DNA.' (An October 2004 article in Scientific American described the Junk DNA hypothesis as "one of the biggest mistakes in the history of molecular biology.") There is no junk in DNA, and to assume there is just eliminates the possibility of making new, important discoveries.
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